Uzbekistan: Where Clans Clash

Now that the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has reportedly died, the country he left behind will have to do something it has never done in its modern form: select a new leader. Karimov ruled Uzbekistan when Russia was still the Soviet Union, and, like most other Central Asian rulers, he did so with an iron fist, hiding a dictatorship behind a disguise of democracy. The stability of the country now rests on the stability of the succession process, but that process itself rests on the exigencies not of electoral politics but of clan politics, something fairly alien to most in the West....